I am a Primary Teacher in Christchurch, NZ, who is passionate about developing e-learning in school. Here is my blog to record my findings and thoughts.

Our Google Docs Journey Begins

We are about to start on our Google Docs journey, we have decided to use the Hapara Dashboard as a managing tool.

I really like Hapara Dashboard and think it is an essential add-on to google apps. I am concerned that our staff will be overloaded with new things and that this is ANOTHER NEW THING.

To get around this I will look at rolling out team-teaching sessions with our Senior Team where we will spend time helping students get to grips with their new Google accounts at the same time as supporting the class teacher with the Hapara Dashboard. I hope that this will add both confidence to the class teacher's thinking about google apps and provide a simple, manageable start to the journey. Our team focus for our first use of Google is on writing. We thought this was an area that could easily translate to the early stages of the SAMR model. The Team-Teaching model I hope will be more effective than whole staff/team PD sessions. Our meeting timetable is packed this term/year and there are plenty of videos that will go through the same setup process which teachers can look at within their own schedule rather than having to meet after school on top of scheduled team and whole staff meetings. Also theses team teaching sessions will involve the students and therefore an authentic learning scenario which can be planned for and reflected upon. There is also a need for an integrated cyber-safety/citizenship program within these sessions. Time is the enemy once again so to combine the google setup with an integrated cyber citizenship task would be great. This needs careful planning between the two teachers before hand, but will be able to be carried on by the class teacher throughout the term. A future post will have this planning and reflection.